Crystal Palace manager Frank de Boer to save Chelsea from Christian Benteke

Christian Benteke and his decent strike rate in the Premier League keeps cropping as a possible (backup) transfer target for Chelsea this summer.

As scary as that sounds, the Crystal Palace striker had a fairly good debut season for his new club after arriving from Liverpool last summer, scoring 15 goals and providing 2 assists in 36 Premier League appearances. Given those goals, it is no surprise that Palace and their new manager Frank de Boer are not too keen on letting go of one of the their best players.

"He's happy here and we really want him to stay. He made a great impact last season, especially in the second half of the season, and he is crucial to us and we don't want to sell him."

-Frank de Boer; source: Evening Standard

Everton are also supposedly interested in Benteke, despite signing Sandro Ramírez as the primary replacement for Romelu Lukaku who took his talents to Manchester United. Not that it matters because Chelsea’s interest is fortunately rather vague at this point and there is seemingly no threat of it evolving into anything more concrete than that.

For now.

(If Chelsea are unable to secure a “proper” first-choice center forward, it’s quite likely that we would try to secure a serviceable pair of legs, such as Benteke or Fernando Llorente to compete with Batshuayi.)